[Flag_This]

"...and then to think they did not have developed germ theory and sterilization techniques."

I heard a story that in the South, during the Civil War, there was a shortage of silk for sutures, so they used hair from horses tails. The hair was stiff, so to make it more flexible they boiled it. Then they noticed that the soldiers with boiled horse-hair sutures suffered from infections at a much lower rate than patients with silk sutures. That's the way I heard it anyway...

[blam]

It was the boiling, not the horse hair that made the difference?

Boiling killed the germs, eh?